The popularity of wireless telephony has grown at an exponential rate over the past several years. As an increasing number of people use wireless telephones as a substitute for traditional wireline telephones, telecommunications service providers must be ready to seamlessly provide service features and facilities normally associated with wireline service to the users of wireless telephony services.
One important and government mandated service required in both wireline and wireless telephony is public safety administration services (also known as emergency or “911” services). The hallmark of 911 service is the ability of the emergency service personnel to view the address of a distressed caller while the call is ongoing. In wireline applications, 911 service is easily administered because the caller uses equipment associated with a fixed address or location. Indeed, the caller's address aids 911 personnel in identifying appropriate emergency services units to respond to the distressed caller's request. In resolving an emergency, the position information may be used by the emergency services network in a variety of ways. For example, it may be used to plot a point on a map, to provide the nearest known street address, or an input to navigation equipment in the emergency response vehicle.
Wireless telephony poses an entirely new challenge for emergency service administration. Due to the very nature of wireless telephony, a distressed caller may be using a mobile unit in any geographic region where wireless service is provided. The challenge for emergency personnel and wireless service providers is to pinpoint the location of a distressed caller so that appropriate emergency service personnel may be dispatched.
The Federal Communication Commission (FCC) has mandated that wireless telecommunication service providers include the capability to locate a mobile subscriber unit within a certain geographical area. Several technologies have emerged and are being developed to meet the government mandate, including, navigational systems such as the global positioning system GPS, wireless assisted GPS, angle of arrival, time difference of arrival, RF fingerprinting and enhanced forward link triangulation. These technologies offer various degrees of accuracy and technological superiority in locating a mobile subscriber unit. Concurrent with the emergence of these position determination technologies, several standards have emerged and are being developed for obtaining location information.
Position information may be delivered to the emergency services network in two basic ways: with the call as part of the call setup information or through a separate data service. The former is known as Call Associated Signaling (CAS) since the position information is delivered in the call signaling. The latter is NCAS and the messages delivered by the data service must be correlated with the call by parameters carried in the message. With NCAS, an Emergency Services Message Entity pulls the position information from the wireless network. Thus, the wireless network uses the above-mentioned positioning technologies to position a mobile subscriber unit.
The American National Standards Institute wireless standards committee (ANSI-41) examining the issues and technologies for meeting the FCC mandate (i.e., the wireless carrier must provide the coordinates of the mobile unit's position to a emergency call center) concluded that the basic functionality necessary for implementation should use non-call path associated signaling (NCAS) in order to meet the situational contingencies and be implemented in the intelligent network on a service control point.
The Telecommunication Industry Association (TIA) Ad Hoc Emergency Services (AHES) committee developed a standard, which would eventually become a joint standard for ANSI-41 and GSM deployments of wireless emergency services—the J-STD-036. The standard develops a reference network model to describe the functional partitioning in which the functions are divided among several functional entities or nodes based on traditional functional separations.
Many of these network nodes maintain databases for storing/correlating files identifying system resources needed for enabling mobile unit positioning. System resources can include mobile serving areas, controllers, and positioning equipment, for example. Successful communication between network nodes depends on accurate synchronization of files contained in the respective databases. This is particularly important in an emergency service networks. Therefore, a need exists for a method and system for auditing network node databases to effect accurate file synchronization.